Category: Fiction

By Paco Garcia Jaen Blip… Blip… Blip… He heard the machine blipping, counting the beatings of his heart and wondering how much longer he would have to listen to the intermittent sensory assault that was keeping him awake. He had...

By Paco Garcia Jaen The morning assaulted me with genuine subtlety. My eyes were itchy when I opened them and told me I hadn’t slept enough. They wanted to go back to sleep and started a fight with my brain. It’s horrible when...

By Sarah Anderson The destruction of Earth took us all by surprise. In our telescopes we saw the lines of multicolored light that tore through the Earth, slicing it to pieces—and by the time we did, we knew we were already...

By Porrick Rasdole I’m in front of a door. It’s dripping with green ichor running from deep veins of engraved masonry. It’s growing each step I take towards it. It takes deep breaths and exhales a sickly mist from vents along...

By Ishi Shen To lovers of history, the hidden and the arcane, I give you the story of Minerva, recorded for posterity. I was born on the human constructed planet called Minerva. Nowadays astro-construction seems just ordinary,...

She has told me I should write a letter to myself. But there is no “myself” anymore. It’s “us” now. It’s been us for a long time and we don’t want to hide it anymore. We understand each other better than anyone else. We know us. The real us, not the me that I’ve put up for the world to like me. So we’ll write to you instead because writing to myself is stupid. We already know about me. About us!

I won’t tell you everything. No, I won’t tell you anything. You must be with them, otherwise why has she suggested that I write to you? That’s because they’ve got to you, but they won’t get to me! I will not tell them anything either, even if they keep giving me these medicine, though I’m sure they’re not medicines, I have seen medicines before and they don’t look like these.

I am so sorry I haven’t been in touch for so long. The nice people at the institution where I live said they didn’t have any pens left, which is very strange because how do they write then? And I know they do because I have seen her coming into my room with notepads but not with pens.

If writing this letter is not proof that my sanity has left me, nothing is. The likelihood of you finding this this piece of paper is next to nothing, but then, the likelihood of me ending up where I am is meant to be next to nothing too.

I wonder if you are still here. I wonder if you are still hiding behind a stack of hay trying to catch me by surprise and throw a bunch of reeds over my head.

I’m hoping you still think of the times when we used to set the traps for the rats, to stop them from nesting and infesting the whole place, ruining the crop that we so hard worked to harvest that year. Your way with cats is something I don’t have and they don’t hunt rats like they did when you were here.